In the weeks following last December’s Newtown school shooting,
President Christina Paxson looked for a way to engage the Brown campus
in the national discussion about guns. With the help of the Political
Theory Project’s student-led Janus Forum, which sponsors debates on
many policy issues, she was on hand one afternoon in mid-March to hear
a panel of three academics tackle the relationship between handguns and
violent crime. By the end of the afternoon it was clear that even
statistically well-equipped academics can hold the same polarized
positions on regulating handguns as the rest of the non-PhD-holding
public.

Scott Kingsley

Political
Theory Project director and political science professor John Tomasi
introduces panel members Carl Bogus, John Lott, and Steven
Lippman.

Writers going at least as far back as D.H. Lawrence have underscored
the unusually violent nature of the American spirit, but it was Carl
Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law, who
gave that perception the certainty of numbers. When it comes to violent
crimes, Bogus said, the United States is “a gigantic outlier among
industrialized nations.” Robberies and aggravated assaults, for
example, turn into murder much more frequently in this country, and
rates of lethal crime are significantly higher.

Why? According to Bogus, the author of The Second Amendment in Law and History: Historians and Constitutional Scholars on the Right to Bear Arms,
the answer is obvious: the prevalence of handguns. “States with high
rates of gun ownership,” he said, “have much higher rates of murder and
suicides.”

He cited a study from the New England Journal of Medicine
that examined crime rates in the twin cities of Seattle and Vancouver
from 1980 to 1986. It found that, while burglary and aggravated assault
rates in the two cities were nearly identical during that period, the
murder rate from handguns was almost five times higher in Seattle than
in Vancouver. The explanation, Bogus argued, was that stricter gun laws
in Vancouver meant fewer handguns in that city.

All of this has an enormous cost to society, argued Steven Lippmann,
a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and behavioral science
at the University of Louisville, who presented charts estimating the
annual cost—which runs into billions of dollars—of caring for the
100,000 people who are injured in U.S. gun shootings every year. The
sense of safety that a handgun provides is illusory, Lippmann insisted.
“Americans,” he said, “while seeking security, are shooting themselves
and their families in their own homes.”

John Lott, a research scholar at the University of Maryland and author of More Guns, Less Crime,
was having none of it. Although Lott agreed with the emphasis on
handguns—all three panelists acknowledged that banning assault weapons
makes no difference in violent crime statistics, as so few of them are
used to shoot people—his statistics supported his argument that the
problem is not too many handguns, but too few, or at least too few in
the hands of the most vulnerable victims of crime.

“Can you name,” Lott asked the audience, “one place where guns are
banned and the murder rate fell?” There is no such place, he said. He
showed graph after graph that illustrated how murder rates increase
after laws are put in place restricting access to guns. “When you ban
guns,” he said, “murder rates go up.”

Why? Gun bans, Lott said, restrict access to weapons only for the
good guys. The bad guys will always be able to get guns. “Who obeys
these laws?” Lott asked. “Law-abiding, good citizens. So you get this
perverse effect where these laws make it easier for these bad guys to
carry out their attacks.… My research convinces me that it’s the most
vulnerable people in our society who benefit the most from gun
ownership: poor minorities, women, and the elderly, for example.”

The discussion left many in the audience uncertain about what to
conclude. When the speakers asked for questions, even Paxson, an
economist, lined up at one of the microphones to ask for clarification
of the speakers’ use of statistics.

Perhaps the most interesting question, though, came from a student who
asked each of the speakers to offer one policy recommendation based on
his research. Bogus replied by suggesting laws to restrict the capacity
of ammunition clips, while Lippmann said the country needed to “address
issues of poverty, jobs, education, and policing.” As for Lott, he said
lawmakers should “make it easier for poor minority people to carry a
concealed handgun.”

None of the panelists seemed entirely satisfied with his answer. The
feeling of frustration in the room was palpable. By the end of the
discussion it was clear that, when it comes to reducing gun violence in
America, finding much agreement on the most effective public policy
remains a long way off.